Exploding Underpants Do Not Need a Victory Lap

I perhaps am a bad American for admitting this, but I truly do not know what to make of the now-almost-weekly announcements by one law-enforcement organization or another that they've foiled another terrorist plot. Last week, we had the FBI sting of the saps in Ohio who the FBI accuses of wanting to blow up a bridge. And on Monday evening, the CIA announced that it had thwarted what news reports called, with the straightest of faces, a new and more sophisticated underwear bomb. What prompts my confusion is not so much the fact that the last administration jerked the entire country around on these matters every time it needed a boost in the polls, but more that we keep hearing about how these dastardly plots were foiled before anyone was in actual danger and that these plots "posed no danger to the American public." Yet the anonymous leaks continue about how the newfangled underwear bomb was "non-metallic" — mmmm, comfort and style! — and, therefore, possibly, maybe, could have eluded both the metal detectors and the full-body scanners in use at airports. As a regular air traveller, I don't even want to think about what might be next.

I've always had my doubts about these FBI sting operations, where some G-man sets up a hapless malcontent and fills him full of arrant bullshit about rocket-launchers and bringing down the infidel, and the guy says, "Yeah, let's do it!" and ends up in Pelican Bay for the rest of his life. Is it the FBI's job to go around and find everyone in the country who can be convinced by a hot meal and new shoes that he can be a world revolutionary hero? What happens, I ask again, if one of these FBI-sponsored plots goes off the rails and actually comes to fruition? Whose head rolls then?

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How about, for starters, the next time you foil a plot, you don't tell anyone about it. You don't call a press conference. You don't leak ominously to CNN about "al Qaeda's master bombmaker" and his signature style. You don't take a victory lap in the newspapers. Maybe it's time for America's silent heroes to be more, well, silent.